Our Divided Political Heart Read Online Free Page B

innovations.
    In these transatlantic dialogues, Americans brought a distinctive setof ideas forged in our own notions of republican government, in Hamiltonian ideas about the role of public authorities in fostering prosperity, in Jeffersonian ideas about democratic responsibility, and in Puritan notions of local autonomy and community. American arguments for individual liberty are always tempered by arguments for personal responsibility, celebrations of community, the idea of fraternity, and the need in self-governing republics for virtuous citizens. The idea that human beings are born to be free is an American instinct. So, too, as Wilson Carey McWilliams argued, is the idea “ that fraternity is a need because , at a level no less true because ultimately beyond human imagining, all men are kinsmen and brothers.”
    This book is thus a plea to restore and refresh the traditional American balance. Doing so is central to reviving our confidence in the future and an approach to politics that brings our country together by speaking to both sides of our political heart.
III
    Those who make the assertions that I have already offered about government and the need for a less lopsided distribution of wealth and income are usually seen, in our current climate, as championing a “liberal” or “progressive” view. And my own political commitments are, in fact, liberal, in the American sense of that word. It is a label I have embraced in recent years in part because too many liberals, after looking at the opinion polls, have fled from any association with the honorable history that word embodies. My views can also be fairly described as progressive, center-left, or social democratic. But I most identify with the description of my politics offered by my conservative friends and polemical adversaries at
National Review
magazine. In an exceptionally kind review of my first book,
Why Americans Hate Politics
,
NR
referred to me as a “ communitarian liberal .”
    That was quite accurate, and it helps explain my preoccupations here. It also underscores the extent to which the political shorthand we use typically needs qualifiers. Not every political argument should be seen as a point-counterpoint confrontation between red and blue, left and right, liberal and conservative.
    In particular, it is possible to believe passionately that our yearning for community has not received the attention it deserves in our current telling of the American story while still celebrating our enduring devotion to individual freedom. Our nation will never be purely communitarian any more than it will be purely individualistic. Almost everything I have written about politics over the years has seen the essential questions before our country as involving a search for the right equilibrium between these commitments. It is the reason my book
Why Americans Hate Politics
so emphasized how debilitating it is to allow our political life to be defined by false choices. False choices are the enemy of balance.
    Conservative readers who know of my commitment to the center-left may be surprised by my affection for the brands of conservatism that emphasize the importance of the social bonds created by tradition, religion, family, and a devotion to place and locality—affections that also help explain my unease with the Tea Party. One conservative writer who has greatly influenced my thinking is Robert A. Nisbet, the sociologist whose classic work
The Quest for Community
found a wide audience across ideological lines.
    “The quest for community will not be denied,” Nisbet once wrote, “for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.” What terrified Nisbet were the efforts of the twentieth century’s centralizing ideologies, Communism and Nazism, to create artificial forms of community built on “ force and terror ” in response to the corrosive effects of modernity on